Drag Racing: It's Like Plunging Your Toilet with a Claymore Mine

Crewman 1: "Whoa, dude, that guy is a hard leaver. Shook the tree like a total Q3."

Crewman 2: "And he was in there, like, shallow, man. I'll bet the RT was a four-eight-five. Then, at the hit, it really carried the nose."

Crewman 1: "Yeah, and no shake, no smoke, just acceptable haze."

Crewman 2: "Held the hides, just that wisp at the big end, but you see those two holes go out at a thousand?"

Crewman 1: "I think he clicked it when he tossed the belt after he hung out the laundry - took the panel for a sky ride."

Crewman 2: "When was it first seeing clutch? We gotta do something radical with one and six, 'cause these 1430s aren't hanging on with even six candles lit."

Translation:Although the driver staged his car farther from the Christmas tree than usual, he still recorded a 0.485-second reaction time, as if making an aggressive, third qualifying run. The car accelerated so hard it lifted the front wheels, yet the slicks neither shook nor spun, emitting mere tendrils of smoke near the traps, indicating strong finish-line acceleration. Unfortunately, two cylinders ceased firing 1000 feet down the track. Just before the driver opened the chutes, he cut the ignition when the supercharger's belt burst free, exiting via a break-away body panel. With the new tires, traction is iffy, even with only six cylinders firing - it might be wise to re-adjust clutch timers No. 1 and No. 6.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

At first, not even Henry Kissinger's savviest linguists could decode this, so I hung around Lee Beard for two weeks. Beard is the crew chief for the Matco Firebird Funny Car, the automobile most likely to do damage to John Force this season. Truth is, Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars are to motorsports what snake-handling Holy Rollers are to Christianity, what kangaroos are to white mice: Related but barely. In no form of motorsports do weirder, more eclectic morsels of mechanical trivia manifest.

For instance: Did you know that a nitro-burning V-8 expends 400 of its 7000 horsepower just to drive the supercharger? The equivalent of a Corvette Z06 engine just to spin the blower. At "the hit," with the car's clutch at maximum slippage, 4500 of those horses will be dissipated as heat alone. It takes 30 horsepower just to spin each fuel pump, and those pumps, pal, are real busy, flowing as much as 1.2 gallons per second at 530 psi. Forcing fuel like that ensures each cylinder is perpetually on the cusp of hydraulic lock. A mechanic explained it thus: "It's like plunging your toilet with a claymore mine. It will probably work, but it's hard on the toilet."

Frankly, nitromethane isn't something a cautious man would have in his house. It was originally used in the '40s as a rocket propellant and is deployed today as an industrial explosive. Although it is 49.5-percent oxygen, nitro is heavy - a gallon weighs more than eight pounds. To derive the most from it, a Funny Car's dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each of 16 spark plugs - approximately the output of your average arc welder. For every 15 seconds a Funny Car idles, the fuel load dwindles by a gallon at the nose. Idle too long and you'll throw weight shift out of whack. One brief burnout, followed by a 4.73-second pass, will consume 15 gallons of the stuff, at $15.75 per. Of course, who's counting? The average pass costs $2000 per second.

Watching a Funny Car launch is like watching a film that has jumped its sprockets. Nothing weighing 2375 pounds has ever removed itself so instantly from your frame of reference. At launch, the car pulls 5.0 g of acceleration, holds 4.0 g for 2.5 to 3.0 seconds, then pulls 4.0 negative g when the chutes blast open. This is not conducive to human well-being. You could ask Joe Amato, who retired from driving when he couldn't keep his retinas attached. From dead rest, the car achieves 100 mph in 1.2 seconds - does so, in fact, in just 100 feet, or four times its own length. At half track, or 660 feet, the car hits 260 mph.